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These Two Brothers Have Worked a Combined 72 Years at a Classic Chicago Steakhouse

Daniel Hautzinger
The Muñozbrothers stand in their uniforms outside the door of Gene & Georgetti
J.J. (left) and Juan (right) Muñoz have worked at Gene & Georgetti for a combined 72 years. Credit: Sandy Noto for WTTW

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When the young Italian immigrant Gene Michelotti joined with the cook Alfred “Georgetti” Federighi to buy the Chicago restaurant where they worked and rename it Gene & Georgetti in 1941, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the president of the United States, the U.S. was months away from the attack on Pearl Harbor, and Edward J. Kelly had been mayor of Chicago for eight years. When the young Mexican immigrant Juan Muñoz became a busser at Gene & Georgetti in May of 1979, Jimmy Carter was president, the U.S. was months away from the Iranian hostage crisis, and Jane Byrne had just been elected mayor of Chicago.

Forty-five years later, Muñoz is still working at Gene & Georgetti – seven presidents, six mayors, and innumerable global crises on. He works as a server alongside his brother, J.J. Muñoz, who has been there for a mere 27 years.

“I like what I do,” says Juan, who has the white mustache and approachable face of a kind but stern grandfather. “That’s why I don’t think to retire. I’m just holding on as long as I can.”

“It’s a lot of fun,” adds the elfin, nattier J.J. “And for me, I wouldn’t know what else to do.”

The brothers have raised children while at Gene & Georgetti, and watched other people’s children grow up and bring children of their own to the restaurant – including Michelle Durpetti, the granddaughter of Gene who now runs the restaurant with her husband Collin.

“Juan actually started at the restaurant when I was six months old,” Durpetti says. “So we joke that we’re six months apart in age.” Years ago, she brought Juan and J.J.’s daughters to an NSYNC concert; more recently, she hosted one of Juan’s daughter’s weddings at the now-closed Rosemont location of Gene & Georgetti.

The sign of Gene & Georgetti in front of train tracks and a blue sky
The Italian steakhouse Gene & Georgetti opened in 1941. Juan Muñoz has been working there for more than half its existence. Credit: Sandy Noto for WTTW

The venerable Italian steakhouse is very much a family business. Michelotti became sole owner when Federighi died in 1969, then his daughter Marion and son-in-law Tony took over when he died in 1989. Michelle Durpetti, Marion and Tony’s only child, has been in charge for the past five or so years.

“Some of the staff members who remember me at 5, I’m now signing their check,” she says.

And plenty of those employees have been working together for decades. Miguel started at Gene & Georgetti in 2004, following J.J., with whom he had worked at the Como Inn. Antonio joined the team around the same time, and his son Juan currently works at the restaurant while attending college. They’re all from the same small town in Jalisco, Mexico. J.J. is the godfather of one of Miguel’s sons, and the Muñozes are related to Antonio and his son.

“It was the same group that always hung out together,” says Juan Muñoz.

“Until the kids grow up!” Miguel chimes in with a grin.

“Now the kids have kids and now we’re grandparents,” J.J. adds.

All of this is remarkable in today’s labor market, particularly for a restaurant. The average employee tenure for restaurants from August, 2021 to August, 2022 was 110 days, according to the restaurant team management platform 7shifts. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the median number of years a worker had been with their employer in January, 2022 was 4.1 years, while leisure and hospitality workers had the lowest median tenure, at 2 years. Juan’s tenure is almost 23 times as long.

The long employment at Gene & Georgetti is a throwback to another era, as are the restaurant’s wood-paneled walls, white tablecloths, and vest-and-tie staff uniforms. (Even back in 1987, the Chicago Tribune said the restaurant “sits in a happy time warp all its own.” The building itself is from the late nineteenth century.) Servers wore white coats until around 2020, and the website “strongly discourage[s]” “sportswear and gym wear” as well as ripped jeans, even if those guidelines aren’t necessarily followed. While the soundtrack today leans on classic rock instead of Frank Sinatra, it’s the sort of place that has a corner booth designated as the “Sinatra booth,” along with an autographed photo of the crooner dating to 1979 – the year Juan started as a busser.

The interior of Gene & Georgetti, with white tablecloths and a corner booth
Frank Sinatra was a frequent customer of Gene & Georgetti, and has his own corner booth. Credit: Sandy Noto for WTTW

“The service is professional and friendly - this is the kind of place where being a good server is more an art form than a college student’s weekend job,” The Infatuation wrote about the restaurant in a 2022 review. One of the restaurant’s most famous dishes, now known as Chicken Joe, came about because a regular customer wanted a spicier chicken. His server, Joe Pacini, consulted with the chef, Mario Navarro, and they came up with a roasted chicken topped with various peppers. Navarro told Pacini to call it “Chicken a la Joe” when the happy recipient asked for a name, and soon other customers were spotting and ordering it.

That was in the early ’80s, when Juan was bussing tables and Pacini had been working at Gene & Georgetti for a decade. Pacini only retired in the new millennium, and still comes to the restaurant, according to the Muñozes. Navarro started in the ’70s and stayed almost 40 years.

“When I was a kid, Juan and J.J. were the younger generation,” Durpetti says. “The seniority group was names like Vince and Orpheus, these guys who were really part of my grandfather’s team.” The Muñozes can still list those men, many of them Greek: Nick, Gus, Lambros, Tom, Savvas.

“You’re in the trenches with people,” Durpetti notes of the “shared camaraderie” that develops amongst a restaurant staff navigating chaotic services, busy nights, and myriad crises.

It was rare to have Latino servers when the Muñozes first came to Chicago, Juan says. “A lot of places, I still remember, there was no Hispanics. The only Hispanics that used to go in the dining room were the Cubans, Puerto Ricans, or from Spain. There were more Europeans in the dining room, and if you were Latino, you were more back of the house.”

The Muñoz brothers identified with much of that older European staff, many of whom were immigrants who barely spoke English when they came to the U.S., just like the Muñozes or Gene Michelotti himself. Gene “was one of the nicest men I ever met,” Juan says. “He was always good with everybody. He was always working. He came from the old country, too, like us.”

A server walks through a restaurant with a wall full of photos
J.J. Muñoz came to Chicago from Mexico in 1981, moving into his brother Juan's apartment and getting a job thanks to him. Credit: Sandy Noto for WTTW

Both Muñozes were teenagers when they came to Chicago from Mexico. Juan arrived first and talked his way into a job by promising a chef he would work for a week without pay as a trial, even though the chef thought he was too small to be an effective laborer. Juan and a friend later heard about two openings at Gene & Georgetti, one for a dishwasher and one for a busser, and flipped a coin to assign them; Juan got busser. He made $10 a day.

“You come with a lot of pressure to work, and you need to work to survive, so you gotta learn,” he says. Learning English allowed him to eventually become a serving bartender, then a server at lunch, and finally a full-time server.

The younger J.J. came to Chicago in 1981, moving into Juan’s apartment in Ukrainian Village. “We’ve been together, living across the street or a block away or on the same street,” J.J. says, for most of their lives. (Their other two brothers also came to Chicago and ended up in the restaurant business. One works alongside J.J.’s son at Topo Gigio, where J.J. himself once had a job.) J.J. got a job as a busser at Gene & Georgetti in 1982, thanks to Juan. After almost a year there, he moved on to other Italian restaurants, before returning to the steakhouse when it expanded in 1997.

“I was always looking to come back to this place,” J.J. says. It “makes you feel like you’re at home.”

It probably helped that his brother was “always, always” watching out for him and other employees. “Not that you know more than anybody,” Juan says, “but if you can help or avoid a mistake from someone, you gotta help.”

“That’s why they say we’re different: I’m very selfish,” J.J. says with a chuckle and a glint in his eye. “He’s always more quiet. I like to joke around.”

“I don’t even know how he got away with things,” the more reflective Juan says dryly. Juan takes a more measured approach to customers, even if he might hug a regular he spots at the bar or who requests him as their server. “You gotta know where you stand. You’re the server, they’re the customers.”

A server attends to customers at a table in a restaurant
“I like what I do,” says Juan Muñoz. “That’s why I don’t think to retire. I’m just holding on as long as I can.” Credit: Sandy Noto for WTTW

That attitude served him well with his most memorable customer, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. “They had security everywhere,” Juan recalls: men in trenchcoats visited the day before to sweep the basement, office, and restaurant, then chose a table next to the exit. Juan still remembers Sharon’s full order, some twenty years later: a garbage salad, onion rings, and a “huge” T-bone steak.

“I’m telling you: I’m never going to forget that as long as I live,” he says.

He and J.J. know that they are a part, however minor, of other people’s indelible memories. “We share birthdays, we share good things, bad things, sad things,” Juan says. Given their longevity at the restaurant, they sometimes worry when they see a regular visit without their partner, because they might be sick or deceased. But they love that they have been able to build relationships with both customers and staff over their decades at Gene & Georgetti.

J.J. admits that he wanted to open his own restaurant at some point, as one of their brothers and some of their colleagues did, while Juan hints that he also shared that aspiration. “You always have those things on your mind that you want to do, but you never force it to become true,” Juan says. “I’m sure a lot of people do. They make it happen.”

But they were content enough to stay in their safe and familiar roles at Gene & Georgetti. They claim few regrets: Juan wishes he had gone to school when he came to Chicago instead of simply working; J.J. rues missing with his own family the special occasions – birthdays, graduations, holidays – that he helped others celebrate.

Nowadays they work shorter shifts, five days a week instead of six, and have time off outside of the three weeks that the restaurant used to close – the only time they could take vacation in the old days. J.J. says the years of being on his feet and running up and down stairs have yet to take a toll on his body, while Juan cites only small aches and a weakening knee. The restaurant under Durpetti covers a portion of health insurance if employees want it, and offers a 401K program. She and her husband have also instituted the shipping of steaks across the country, and want to expand the brand to a few other locations in prime spots like South Florida.  

“Michelle worked so hard to keep the place up and to keep the place open [during COVID],” Juan says. “She was always looking after us, to protect us. That’s one of the reasons [I’ve stayed so long] – where can you go to get this? I don’t think there’s any other place.”

Durpetti has her own praise for the Muñozes. “They genuinely care about the customer experience,” she says. “They also care about one another, in terms of who they are as part of a larger whole. They want the restaurant to be respected. They want each other and themselves to be respected.”

She is surprised to hear that they praise her, given that they “throw on compliments like the average person throws on a sewer cover,” she says. “They’re very much like versions of my own father, where if I did it right, he would look at me and say, ‘Well, that was the expectation.’”

The Muñoz brothers’ presence as a link to the restaurant in her father’s and even grandfather’s time is reassuring. “Having Juan there, who knew Gene, worked with Tony, and is now there with me, really creates a complete circle,” she says. “It’s a very comforting thing to just know that he’s there.”

The Muñoz brothers pose in front of a mural amongst restaurant tables
“I was always looking to come back to this place,” J.J. Muñoz says. It “makes you feel like you’re at home.” Credit: Sandy Noto for WTTW